


Burn to Glow

by StellarRequiem



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Healthy Relationship AU, M/M, all the growth and even fluff I always wanted and never got, therapy au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-26 14:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9904274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: AU wherein Locus actually IS using his money on therapy, thus recognizing toxic behavior from Felix which only worsens after Siris is killed on a mission. When Locus confronts Felix, he’s unreceptive. Locus leaves him. They later meet again on a job, eventually reconcile, each addressing their own behavior.





	1. Progress Is Guided

“ _Therapy_?” he says, so flippant, so irreverent. He means it as an insult. He doesn’t know it’s true.

 

***

 

Locus—Sam, really, though he doesn’t much _feel_ like Sam—goes into his doctor’s office  quietly. He doesn’t discuss his work in this far out of town suburban office where people stare at him, dumbstruck by the concept that a 6’5” grown man built not unlike a tank could be soft enough somehow to need a therapist. But they don’t know what he does, and so don’t know what he’s seen. They haven't heard what he's heard. They don’t wake up at night sweating with the sound of gunfire in their heads, people still screaming in their ears, they do not wake up, some days, and look in the mirror, only to find a face they do not recognize, so long lost beneath a helmet. They do not at once revel in and flinch from the concept of the armor they stole when they were discharged, a dead captain’s words still ringing in the confines of its helmet. “ _you are nothing but a suit of armor and a gun.”_

They are not reminded, constantly, of how _insane_ these symptoms actually are.

“you’ve made enormous progress,” the doctor tells him. “what is it that makes you think you haven't?”

“I know I have. I question if it’s enough.”

 _That broken fucking brain of yours._ Isaac still sees that in him. He can't shake the sense that he's right.

“how would you measure what's enough?”

“…when others can no longer sense it.”

“it?”

 _insanity. Weakness._ How broken he is. The doctor frowns.

“is there someone in particular you feel exemplifies this problem we could talk about?”

He’d rather not. It seems too private, too personal, to mention Isaac's name here, though he's mentioned a partner before.

“a coworker,” he finally allows.

“may I ask in what context? I realize there is some sensitivity to what you do, you don’t need to be detailed.”

Carefully, after some encouragement—much encouragement—Locus allows himself to explain very briefly the incident with the comms. Not why they had them not what they were doing. Only that there were comms and a comment on them, that Isaac had tossed his aside, and nearly been injured because if it. That Locus’ broken brain was what he blamed, though he'd been so sure he was in the right. The doctor frowns until he confesses that a single phrase— _that broken brain—_ that shouldn’t have bothered him had kept creeping into his head afterward. For days. After all, Isaac was not the only one who had called him crazy that night.

“I don’t understand,” she says, a verbal nudge, “why you feel like that comment shouldn’t bother you. Calling you _broken_ is hardly an inoffensive thing to say.”

“I should be used to it by now.”

Her brows furrow, a deep, deep canyon of concern and wrinkles forming between them.

“Do you mean to comments like this generally, or comments from your coworker specifically?”

“Both, but especially from I—him.”

The doctor sits back in her chair and swivels it once, side to side, as she does when she’s highly focused. She’s encouraged him to notice such quirks and gestures in others, that he might also recognize them in himself. _What is your body telling you about how you feel? If you listen closely, it can help you understand what’s going on inside yourself and be mindful of that, even when you feel ‘distant’ from yourself._

“So, you’re saying that this happens regularly?” She askes. Locus nods. “Can you give me some examples, aside from the incident with the earpieces?”

Locus eyes her warily. He knows that must be what’s on his face, that a defensive nervousness is what’s tightening in his chest. He can feel the stiffness in his posture.

 _She can’t help if you don’t answer her,_ he reminds himself. _That’s how this works._

Help _him._ The man in the mirror, and under the helmet.

He does his best to recall succinct and vivid examples. His memory is not infallible-far from it—these days _,_ but the information comes to him more easily that he might have expected. He stops when he becomes aware of the intensity in her face while she listens, her body once again tipped forward in her chair, her arms crossed around her.

“Why is this relevant?” he snaps, abruptly cutting himself off. She takes it so in stride he may as well have whispered, resting her hands on her crossed knee and inquiring gently but intently, as is her way.

“I'm going to have to answer that with another question—do you see a pattern in what you're telling me? Are there times your partner is more likely to make these hurtful comments?”

 _They’re not to hurt. They’re true,_ he thinks to himself, but he considers her question regardless.

“Possibly when he’s frustrated.”

“frustration over what?” anything specific?”

“Problems in a mi—our work.”

“when mistakes are made?”

_By who?_

“Yes,” he replies, aware that his mind is wandering as he does. “I suppose.”

_By who?_

But that isn’t really the question. It’s her that asks _the_ question.

“When _he_ makes mistakes?”

“. . . Yes.”

He’s petty that way. Locus doesn’t understand the significance—the churning of feeling, an unsettled broiling, that rises in his gut is _feeling,_ not _knowing_ —that is simply how Gates _is._ And circumstances does not make him wrong. His arrogance aside, Locus’ correcting for him notwithstanding, Isaac Gates is rarely _wrong._

The Doctor is far less content with this answer than Locus would like to be.

“that’s very concerning to me,” she tells him without earnest, but with great feeling he finds disconcerting. This doesn't sound like a hospitable environment for your recovery. “

“I don’t understand.”

She often meets that comment with another question, preferring a highly Socratic method when aiding him in parsing his thoughts and feelings and ghosts, but today she spins her chair to face the bookshelf along her wall. She pulls down an old, paper-style book and holds it out to him after a moment of flipping the musty pages. She allows him to take in the title, _The Dangerous Companion: recognizing extortionist, abusive, and egocentric behaviors in the social house , _before speaking.

“I give you that because there is a very good synopsis at the beginning of chapter three regarding a practice called _gaslighting._ It’s something that people will do, for various reasons, whether it be to win an argument or even to degrade someone else, when they wish to make the other person doubt themselves and their own thinking. I’d like you to read through the synopsis, if you don’t mind, and consider—you don’t need to say anything to me unless you want to—whether your coworker’s insults might be akin to what the author is describing.”

The words spin on the page.

_Denial, misdirection, contradiction—_

_lying—_ no, Gates is a terrible liar. Not when he has to improvise from scratch. He can bend words, not invent realities. Their most recent mission made that all too clear.

_attempts_ _to destabilize and delegitimize, sow seeds of doubt . . .  question their own memory, sanity—_

But he’s not _wrong_ about Locus’ sanity.

He stares into the page without comment, turning the shifting words over in his head, a contradiction popping up to guard against each of them in turn.

“No,” he grunts, staring into the page. A glance at the doctor reveals nothing in her expression regarding her approval of this answer.

“Are you going to tell me I’m wrong?” he presses after a moment of this even, waiting look.

“Of course not, Sam. You know your own partner and your own situation. If you say that you don’t see these signs in your relationship, then I’ll take your word for it.” She halts for a moment, swiveling the chair once. It’s a lot of motion from someone who’s supposed to be an island of calm rationality in his life, but these little indications of genuine thought, these ques that he’s learned to read—sometimes on his own, oftentimes asking her directly—constitute much of what he likes about this particular doctor. He likes knowing what she thinks of him and when through means other than her words.

“Why would I?” she adds upon completing her swivel.

Locus doesn’t have an answer for that.

He looks at a spot on the wall above her head. She waits in silence until he decides he’d like to say something—or at least, that he should. There’s an unsettled, claustrophobic feeling in his center chest that he doesn’t know how to describe to himself, rendering his best attempts to parce its implications for his thoughts futile at best, and leaving him no recourse but to express something of his fractured mind allowed. _Not broken—wounded. Post-traumatic stress is an injury to the mind. Anxiety and disassociation are its misguided attempts at healing._

This is what the doctor has helped him to understand. It works roughly 70% of the time. Only 70% of the time.

The other 30% he is not himself. He’s no one. He’s insane. He’s armor, with a maze of a head that makes no sense and is helpful to no one, except when working forces it into something orderly.

“Because I could be. Wrong.”

“Do you think that’s probable, or possible?”

“. . . I’m not sure.”

She nods consolingly, gentle-eyed.

“In that case, how would you feel about focusing on your _confidence_ in your thoughts for our next session? CBT relies on mindfulness: it’s important that you be able to  trust your own assessments of yourself if you’re to act on them.”

“You can’t create confidence in something that doesn’t warrant it and expect it to work,” he retorts. The doctor’s brows rise a little higher on her forehead.

“Then we had better be certain it _does_ warrant confidence. I’d like your homework this week to make notes on the situations in which you are the least trusting of your thoughts. Don’t analyze them: just write them down.”

“A mission report.”

“Exactly. Succinct and to the point, only the facts. If there are moments when you feel especially confident, go ahead and note those, too. Does that work for you?”

Locus considers the question—he won’t promise what he can’t fulfill. As of now, Isaac is still out of commission courtesy of his leg, and Megan has relegated Mason to at least a week’s recovery time in response to the bruising that had welled across his back in the days following the ruined Lozano mission. The likelihood of either of them agreeing to a bounty now is low, and any new mission they accept will be about recon for now, besides. Of all the times to take physical notes, this week is hardly the worst.

“Yes,” he says.

The doctor smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, the source for this particular description of gaslighting comes from the Wikipedia article on it simply because of its succinctness. A longer form description that highlights a lot of Felix’s specific tendencies towards this tactic (whether with the BGC, Locus, or the News) would be:
> 
> “Effective gaslighting can be accomplished in several different ways. Sometimes, a person can assert something with such an apparent intensity of conviction that the other person begins to doubt their own perspective. Other times, vigorous and unwavering denial coupled with a display of righteous indignation can accomplish the same task. Bringing up historical facts that seem largely accurate but contain minute, hard-to-prove distortions and using them to “prove” the correctness of one’s position is another method. Gaslighting is particularly effective when coupled with other tactics such as shaming and guilting. Anything that aids in getting another person to doubt their judgment and back down will work.” From http://counsellingresource.com/features/2011/11/08/gaslighting/
> 
> In canon, we mostly see Felix using attacks against his victim’s sanity or understanding of reality. He frequently notes Wash’s paranoia, for example, and is constantly referring to Locus as insane, broken, “raving lunatic,” etc. Arguably, his comment to Sharkface regarding “the grown ups are talking” is meant to demean Sharkface’s own extensive experience as a mercenary soldier (hired by Charon) and establish Felix and Locus’ supremacy, but that one is more of a reach.
> 
> Other links I looked over for this fic on top of existing knowledge include:  
> http://www.thehotline.org/2014/05/what-is-gaslighting/  
> https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/power-in-relationships/200905/are-you-being-gaslighted


	2. Mindfulness Matters

Megan Wu very rarely puts her foot down, but it does happen. Rarely is it convenient.

“ _I’m not getting out of the house tomorrow, guys. I’m sorry.”_

_“What are you, twelve?”_

_“No, Gates, I’m a_ father _who respects his wife. She’s not wrong. The baby has a fever, and my leg is out of whack anyway. If she’s prepared to be the voice of reason, I don’t really want to fight her.”_

_“Oh, that’s great partnering, right there.”_

_“_ Gates.”

Isaac has been petulant since Mason bailed out. It should not, therefore, be surprising that Sam assumes the responsibility of orchestrating the small operation this next bounty demands. The first since Lozano, he is careful in his planning, and strict in his orders, which Isaac in no uncertain terms despises.

“You wanna be more specific?” he demands, as Sam outlines their infiltration of a 30th floor office suite. “ _Remove opposition?_ Does that mean the guards, or are you going to shoot the bounty again?”

It takes him a beat to process.

“ _Lozano,_ Genius,” Isaac drawls. He has a facetious near purr way of speaking when he’s feeling sulky. It grates on Sam in a way that churns his stomach. _Where are your feelings? In the stomach? Which feelings do you usually find there?_

_. . . Anxiety._

That takes another beat to process. Not rage, not offense, _anxiety._

_Why?_

He scrambles to explain himself, the words putty in his head, though they come out of his mouth in a tone that’s excessively stern. Forced, he realizes. _Why?_

“Had you and Siris not insisted on referring to he and his family by their _given names_ in _front_ of Lozano, there’s have been no reason to silence him.”

“ _Silence?_ You shot the guy in cold blood while he was blindfolded and strapped to a chair.”

“I eliminated any chance he could convey that information to his father and endanger Siris’ _entire_ _family_.”

Isaac snorts.

“Keep telling yourself that, psycho.”

The anxiety melts.

But, in its place, there comes a knowing feeling like being punched in the stomach only to be held down beneath the fist.

In the shaky confines of his mind, Locus makes a note on a mission report that only he can see.


End file.
